Butterfly's Shadow (5 page)

When the ship steamed out of the harbour Pinkerton was busy and failed to notice the moment when they slipped between the lighthouses and out to the open sea. As the wind sharpened and the waves creamed against the hull, he glanced back at the receding coastline and became aware of a sense of freedom, as though a fragile, yet unexpectedly powerful chain that had wound its way round him like a clinging ivy, had suddenly snapped.

Cho-Cho stood outside the house, watching the departing ship through the telescope he had brought her. Surely that was him, on deck, arm raised, waving? Behind her she heard a small sound and glanced round: in the morning breeze the hand-shaped
tegashiwa
leaf fluttered, up and down, waving farewell and beckoning, come back.

When the last trace of the ship was lost beyond the horizon she felt a chill as though the sun was covered by a sheet of ice and hurried into the house.

She planted the seeds and watered the ground. Small green shoots appeared and, to her delight, leaves and then buds that opened into flowers, bright and glowing. Where earlier she had watched for the cherry blossom, the plum, the chrysanthemums, now she hovered over these small saucers in colours she would once have considered too bright, too obvious. She was getting the garden ready for Pinkerton’s return. For, of course, he would return.

And it was not only in the garden that new life was growing.

*

Calling on Cho-Cho one evening, Sharpless saw that she was busy at the far end of the garden, stooping to tie up a showy orange flower whose stalk was too fragile to stand without support. Suzuki showed him into the house and stood nearby, eyes lowered. In the weeks following Pinkerton’s departure, he had seen how tenderly she cared for Cho-Cho, anticipating her needs, small, bright eyes following her mistress’s every movement. But today her broad face was closed, she seemed distant.

‘Suzuki? Is something wrong?’

‘In one way, you could say so. In another, things could not be better.’

He knew enough of the form to wait.

‘She is expecting a child.’

This was an appalling indiscretion, as they were both aware. But Suzuki, less naïve than her mistress, was also aware of the realities involved.

‘If Lieutenant Pinkerton could be informed—’

But Cho-Cho was approaching, and the conversation ceased.

He should not have been surprised. Indeed, he was saddened rather than surprised. The girl’s future had narrowed.

When the evidence was visible to all, Cho-Cho invited Sharpless to tea. She had not previously honoured him with the ceremony. Now he sat, legs folded under him, while she knelt, setting out the little cups, the scoop and powdered green tea and bowl; boiled the water, whisked and waited, concentrating on every movement.

Self-consciously he smoothed back his lank hair, almost Japanese in its darkness – not a grey hair to be seen though he was nudging forty-five. His scrawny, weightless body settled comfortably into a posture foreigners usually found painful. He folded his hands and watched her precise movements, the way she honoured each act in turn.

She had performed the tea ceremony for Pinkerton once,
settling, as now, for the shorter version that lasted barely an hour, but it had not been one of their successes. He commented to Sharpless later, ‘Pretty long wait for a mouthful of dishwater.’

Sharpless had tried to explain that the ceremony required years of training and practice: ‘
Chanoyu
is an art, a ritual of mystical significance which must be performed in a studied, graceful manner.’

He could enjoy it, he was enjoying it now, watching Cho-Cho’s small hands lifting, pouring, whisking the liquid to a froth. The bowl she used was precious, one of her few possessions, a relic of a once-prosperous family. Black Oribe ceramic, it could be three or four hundred years old. He admired its lack of symmetry, the rustic surface. Still, he guiltily found himself acknowledging that the whole point of this extended ceremony, its arcane complexity, detail and importance, was, as Pinkerton had implied, the making and serving of a cup of tea.

After the ritual had been completed, the tea tasted, and the utensils carefully washed and dried and cleared away, Cho-Cho gave Sharpless her news. He offered his congratulations and told her he would write at once to inform Lieutenant Pinkerton that he was to be a father.

‘A big surprise!’ she said, smiling. ‘It will bring him pleasure.’

Sharpless certainly agreed with the first statement. He was less sure about the second.

When the reply arrived, a brief scrawl, the large, untidy handwriting covering the page, it was accompanied by dollar bills in large denominations. Pinkerton wrote that he was sending more than enough to cover the expenses of the confinement and extend the rental of the house. Cho-Cho, he added, was a working girl in good health, and as for the child, under the circumstances, who could know if it was even his? No personal message enclosed.

Sharpless sat for a long time at his desk, feeling a greyness settle over him; a sense of failure, of defeat, though who or what had defeated him he could not have said. Next day he called on Cho-Cho, and told her he had heard from Pinkerton. The lieutenant was, of course, delighted by the news. He had sent money to cover all expenses.

‘And does he say when he will be returning?’

‘It was a brief communication, between duties. He must be extremely busy.’

It was cowardly. It was also wrong, to continue to give her false hope. But he told himself that a woman expecting a child could not be expected also to handle news that would destroy all hope. Surely there would be a better time, a gentler way to lead her into reality?

When the child was born, Sharpless paid Cho-Cho a visit, bearing gifts.

She held out a tiny bundle, red-faced, snuffling. Sharpless saw that the infant had a fuzzy cap of pale gold hair; he stared out, unfocused, with small blue eyes. The Pinkerton genes were evident.

‘Here he is, Sharpless-san. My
Kanashimi
.’

He looked startled: ‘You’re naming him Sorrow?’

‘It also means Trouble.’

‘Poor boy!’

She relented. ‘It’s a little joke among mothers. You tell him, Suzuki.’

‘He is named
Kanashimi
meaning its opposite –
Sachio
.’

‘It’s to fend off the evil eye. If you’re superstitious, it’s a good idea to conceal the arrival of happiness,’ Cho-Cho said. ‘I’m not superstitious, of course, but . . .’ she laughed. ‘Just in case.’

In due course, when the boy was older and less vulnerable, Sharpless was informed, he could address the child by his true name.

He paid a flowery tribute of admiration to the new arrival, presented appropriate gifts and left.

Alone, Cho-Cho leaned over the swaddled bundle, studying the tiny features. She must learn to play a new role: that of mother. But she must first grow accustomed to the very existence of a puzzling creature, one that had grown inside her – how unlikely that had seemed at the beginning, and then how natural. But now, escaping from her body, this small entity that had been part of her must be acknowledged as separate. She must learn to respect that separateness, while still feeling the two of them were one. She breathed in the odour of his body, as sweet as milk and rice, rested her palm on the crown of his head, feeling the faint pulse; lifted a tiny hand with its shrimp-like fingers that already could grip, the pink bud of a mouth that knew its way to her breast. Happiness.
Sachio
. Joy.

Sharpless was aware that the cash from Pinkerton must be running low. He tried to give Cho-Cho money he claimed had come from the absent husband. She handed it back. Whether she believed him or not he was unsure, but the response was exquisitely reasoned:

‘I will wait until he returns; it is not . . . correct this way.’

Sharpless guessed she might feel that accepting an impersonal payout reduced the relationship to the level of commerce. She was a wife. Was she not?

Meanwhile she used her ingenuity to maintain independence. A zoologist friend of her father’s had once told her that there was as much nourishment in the larvae of silk moths as in a domestic fowl. Her father had retorted drily that it would take a considerable number of larvae to equal a chicken breast. But to nourish a growing child she was prepared to try anything. Next to the house was a white mulberry tree; the cocoons were collected and split open; the silkworms cooked with appropriate seasoning. She dug up the garden and planted vegetables; what had once been flower beds were now pushing
up food crops. She kept chickens. She learned to fish, baiting the hook with limpets pulled from rocks. She collected and cooked snails. But there was one aspect of reality that was not negotiable: she could no longer afford to employ Suzuki. Any object of value had been sold; the money had run out and ingenuity could not be stretched to cover the hole that yawned before her.

The difficulty was fundamental: how to arrive at a solution that would enable them to separate without embarrassment; without loss of face on either side.

Cho-Cho waited until the infant’s bath time; a conveniently distracting moment, with both women concentrating on the baby. She began by expressing concern for Suzuki’s possible state of mind: her own regret that they lived so quietly, spent such uneventful days.

‘You must be growing restless in this small house; there is so little opportunity for you to exercise your talents. Really, Suzuki, I must apologise.’

She reached for the towel the maid held out. ‘Sharpless-san was telling me about a family newly arrived from Italy; they have one of the big houses the other side of the harbour . . .’

The father was in the silk business and would be spending some time inspecting factories in the province. The Italian wife was looking for someone to help with two small children.

‘Sharpless-san could provide an excellent reference for you. This could be a fine opportunity . . .’ And so forth.

The maid’s smooth, square face remained expressionless. She nodded. Suzuki needed no lessons in the nuances of social deviousness. She expressed her gratitude to Cho-Cho-san, and indeed to Sharpless-san for his kindness in mentioning the Italian family.

‘I will make enquiries without delay.’ She broke off to take the baby and prepare him for sleep. She knew what her employer was really saying, and Cho-Cho knew that she knew. But the form had been observed.

A few days later Suzuki announced that she had found work. Not with the Italian family, but in a silk-reeling factory on the outskirts of town. She was grateful to Sharpless-san: his mention of the Italians had been of help to her. This was an excellent opportunity; she was grateful to Cho-Cho-san for drawing her attention . . . And so forth.

Then, a hesitation; a diffidence: it would be a great kindness if Cho-Cho-san were to permit Suzuki to occupy her usual sleeping space at the back of the house – for a while.

‘Luckily the factory shifts are quite long so I will not be in your way.’ And so forth.

Cho-Cho knew what her maid was really saying and Suzuki knew that she knew. Nothing was spoken, all was understood, and the transition was made: Suzuki would continue to spread her futon in a corner of the house, and asked permission to make ‘a trivial contribution’ to the household expenses. Cho-Cho insisted that she must stay until she found more comfortable lodgings. It was, of course, they agreed, a temporary arrangement.

Next day, Suzuki put on her thick cotton work clothes and went out into the pre-dawn mist and the unknown territory of her new life.

After the silk farmers had gathered the bulging cocoons from mulberry trees stripped bare to feed the ravenous larvae, they took them to the factory. Suzuki joined the line of girls waiting to take charge of the loaded baskets and carry them indoors to the cauldrons of boiling water, where the process began.

When she stumbled home from the factory long after dark, too exhausted to eat, an odd reversal of roles took place: it was Cho-Cho who persuaded her to nibble a few grains of rice; who undressed and washed the dazed girl and helped her to the futon spread out for her while, half asleep, she tried to describe her day.

‘Poor worms! They work so hard, spinning threads, wrapping
themselves in their fat cocoons, and then they’re tipped into cauldrons and boiled alive. I have to pick out any that have become moths—’

‘But why?’

‘They crack open the cocoon, to get out. The thread is broken, useless.’ She yawned, too tired to cover her mouth. ‘When the cocoons are soft, we scoop them out of the water and very carefully start to wind the threads on to iron reels. They’re beautiful, as fine as cobwebs.’

‘It sounds difficult.’

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Difficult. I have acquired a skill.’

But when Suzuki spoke of the awesome size of the silk workshop; the long lines of tables where the women worked; the impressive quantity of thread produced – ‘the thread from one cocoon can measure from the door to the shore’ – she said nothing of the boiling vats that spilled over, scalding her arms, the fingertip testing of water temperature, the dangers of unstable machinery.

When she came home one night with bleeding hands, she shrugged away Cho-Cho’s alarmed questions.

‘Machinery can break down. Girls are injured.’

Cho-Cho, distraught, spread healing ointment on the damaged fingers.

‘You must take greater care.’

Together the two women clung to a precarious existence, and in the small house on the hillside Suzuki could still inhabit another world, one where a baby learned to crawl and then to walk. Where the air was fragrant with steaming rice and
shoyu
and where clean clothes flapped on the line outside the door. Alongside her at the workbench were girls who slept in cramped, airless dormitories, who had to line up for baths, moving from factory to sleeping quarters like prisoners. She pitied them; she considered herself blessed.

Occasionally Sharpless visited, bringing a tactful gift, small enough to be acceptable, slipping an additional offering to Suzuki, who could discreetly add it to the household store.